Most of the young men of talent whom I have met in this country give one the impression of being somewhat demented. Why shouldn’t they? They are living amidst spiritual gorillas, living with food and drink maniacs, success-mongers, gadget innovators, publicity hounds. God, if I were a young man today, if I were faced with a world such as we have created, I would blow my brains out. Or perhaps, like Socrates, I would walk into the market place and spill my seed on the ground. I would certainly never think to write a book or paint a picture or compose a piece of music. For whom? Who beside a handful of desperate souls can recognize a work of art? What can you do with yourself if your life is dedicated to beauty? Do you want to face the prospect of spending the rest of your life in a strait-jacket?

Go West, young man! They used to say. Today we have to say: Shoot yourself, young man, there is no hope for you!

— Henry Miller

Prologue ...

"Author James Bamford first brought to public attention Operation Northwoods — a proposal by the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S. military to stage a series of fake terror attacks against the U.S. populace to drum up support for a war against Cuba in the 1960s.

Bamford commented, ‘Here we are, forty years afterward, and it’s only now coming out. You just wonder what is going to be exposed forty years from now.’

"Insight," July 30, 2001,

from The Terror Timeline, by Paul Thompson

To Cherry,

We thought we lived in the best country in the world and it turned out to be the worst.

Marine Generals talking about how fun it is to kill. Americans abusing Iraqi citizens in every form imaginable. Hummer. A sex term adopted by the military, turned into a vehicle on our streets and a commercial on our TVs. Little kids talking about wanting to get a hummer. All in the name of good ol’ American patriotism and gettin’ behind the team.

Does anyone at Rotary realize that we killed more Native Americans in our seizure of the American landscape than the six million killed by Hitler in the death camps?

If they did realize, would it matter? Would it make any difference? Would we act differently? Or do these things happen just because we are what we are? And finding them out will not make a whit of difference — these atrocities will continue to crop up like dandelions on a green American lawn in Dubuque.

The Soviet Union once served as our Bogeyman. Then it was the criminal and drugs. Now it is the terrorist.

You know, love, when I was in seminary I prayed and prayed in my dark room at night for God to let me live life on the edge, to really, really serve him. I would even be a celebrated hero if he needed me to be.

This life we have out here on the prairie is on the edge all right. I’ve finally figured it out. God does have a sense of humor. Out here where it looks as if nothing is happening is where it’s most difficult of all.

Good German equals Good American. It’s time to start setting our unthinkable thoughts loose in the town square. They yearn to fly.

Best, Jack

[ Jack Robert King's dedication to his unpublished novel, The Complex Apartment]

Chapter 1 ...

The majority never has right on its side. I said never! That’s one of those social lies, which a free, intelligent man has to rebel against. Who is it who makes up the majority of inhabitants of any given country? The clever or the stupid? I think we can all agree that all over the world, the stupid are in a quite frighteningly overwhelming majority. But surely to God it can’t be right that through all eternity the stupid shall have dominion over the clever!

— Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People

"Good morning, dear people.

"Is this Heaven?

"No, it’s Iowa.

"This is Bigfoot Radio, streaming to you on the Internet at www.lookinforbigfoot.net ...

"Hello.

"My name is Jack Robert King.

"They killed Paul Wellstone.

"I can feel it all around me, like ninety-eight percent humidity, like the feeling there is someone in the house who shouldn’t be there.

"They attacked the World Trade Center, or they let it happen, to put out the Patriot Act, to steal the oil, to rule the world, to impress their long-lost junior high sweethearts, who knows why.

"I suddenly realize it and reach behind me into the backseat to snatch the bad guy who I know is there, but all I grab is air. I can still hear it breathing, catch a shadow in the rearview mirror.

"They killed the Kennedys and Martin and now we’ve got the books and testimony, but before that all I had to do was walk down to the SuperValue for Mom to buy bread and stand on a milk crate to look into the eyes of the checkout lady as she counted my change.

"I might have guessed Vietnam was a lie by the glare in Father Tom’s eye and the way Sister Margaret rushed by, like she was always on her way somewhere to cry.

"Someone once said that violence is as American as apple pie and now I know why. Just some small kid from a small town, thinking nothing ever happened there, when actually I was right in the middle of the action.

"The baker bombed Iraq, the barber gunned down Bobby, and the four little grandmothers in blue flower dresses and green metal chairs in that row of white porches on Sarah Street sliced the throats of children in El Salvador in their spare time during the summers in the ’80s. You can see it in their eyes, dull and dead, not from seeing too much of the world, but too little.

"The robins are tweet-tweeting on the front lawn. Puffing their red chests into the sun. Their song: kill the niggers.

"On the days we bombed Iraq the Farmers Coop elevator dryers hummed a happy tune; the coffee-goers smiled across Formica tables and asked for cream.

"And for the ten years in between, while children died from the sanctions, from no food or medicine or light or heat or love or prayers or Hardee’s, Mr. Johnson and Mr. Smith went to work each day, drove on the right side of the road, smiled, kept their desks in order, and were not considered suspects.

"They really, truly stole a presidential election in the United States and our response was to wave at the limousines as they passed by on the TV atop the kitchen counter, next to the toaster.

"They shot down or lasered-down Wellstone’s plane and they really did attack their own Pentagon. I see this and I have zero documentation. I don’t care. I have all the proof I need from the glazed look in your eye as you struggle to attach the American flag to your car antenna.

"I understand America by watching you. I know it from growing up in the Midwest of America, from playing baseball and football and riding down the middle of the street with no hands eating an ice cream cone. The strawberry drips on my T-shirt and I don’t care. Mom will wash it, clean it up, just as she rinses the blood of a thousand Chileans from her hands. A lemony spray makes everything smell fresh.

"I see more than I want to in the referee’s face as he prepares the jump-ball toss and the smile of the drive-up teller as she helps another customer.

"Would evil men and women kill in order to gain absolute power? Pretty darn near impossible to believe when they look just like us and sound like us, tell the same tired jokes and watch the same TV shows.

"I do know, because I saw it myself over the top of my SuperSize Diet Pepsi, that while children are being bombed to gooey bits, the mail still arrives at our house at ten and the garbage is picked up at one, school dismisses at three-thirty and Raymond comes on at seven.

"I see the banality of evil old Mrs. Schwartz using her tongs to set another fish square into a slot on a lunch tray at St. Mark’s elementary as a child in Baghdad has his nose blown off by a small bomb he thought was a toy.

"I do not have a leaked file or a tidbit of information or an inside source.

"I know all I need to know from seeing your guilty face staring out into the night while you wash dishes, or leaning out the car window to order an A&W root beer, or chasing your children into the school house with one last admonition.

"I don’t need to know George Bush or Karl Rove.

I know you.

Chapter 2 ...

So the people of the valley sent a message up the hill, asking for the buried treasure, tons of gold for which they’d kill.

—One Tin Soldier, words and music by Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter, 1969

"Hello out there in radio land!

"Is This Heaven?

"It’s Iowa.

"And you are most competently tuned to Bigfoot Radio, streaming on the Internet at www.lookinforbigfoot.net.

This is Show Number Nine for all you FBI agents in your basements keeping score, partying with your black and white photo display of Janet Reno, Condi, Lynne Cheney. Have at it boys. How! How! How! How!

"Rosa Parks took her seat because she just couldn’t take it anymore.

Where the hell can I plop down?

"... And FBI agents, just so you and I are on the same page: I don’t see your dead icons — Jack Coler and Ronald Williams — as heroes. I don’t think they were murdered, either. And I don’t think it matters who killed them. They were on the Pine Ridge reservation helping the United States government screw some poor people, to create goon squads, to subdue some warriors who had balls enough to fight back. They were killers who died as they lived. Leonard Peltier is the hero in this, certainly not Coler or Williams....

-

"Good morning, Hope, Arkansas. There is no hope. We hoped in Clinton and it turned out to be crap. I even had dreams about him driving past my home and waving to me. That’s the kind of hope we saw in Bill Clinton. But he bombed the world and reformed welfare and refused to release Peltier. A lot of other things. No hope. Good morning, heartache....

"Some guy went to Ground Zero and shot himself after the election.

"Another guy set himself on fire outside the White House.

"Those are the two most honest responses to the election of George W. Bush that I have heard of.

Most people just change channels....

-

"Good morning New York City and Columbus, Nebraska, a mid-size city in the most stupid state in the nation. Congratulations. You elected a moron. Your greasy, rotting, dead grandparents on the hillside must be so proud.

"I have to say that I think I might have a death wish myself. Not George Bush’s, my own.

"You start off life and it’s an adventure until about junior high, then you plow onward only because you have absolutely no choice. Then you hit young adulthood and things open up again, there are possibilities, hope.

"Then you get to my age and it seems like, well, I don’t know.... I’ve seen Jeopardy and Wheel as much as I need to, and I never really need to hear another Rolling Stones song. I’m good.

Though, Paradise by the Dashboard Lights" still gets me slappin’ the steering wheel. The parts about eternity and vows. Forever. And ever. My Christ. It’s like, how does this guy know this stuff about me?

"It just seems like there are no more adventures. The world is going to be the world without me. Somebody once told me that to judge your own importance you stick your finger in a glass of water and then pull it out again.

"I think he was the Doom Guru of the Brown County Fair, or maybe he was my father.

Oh, well....

Papers rustled over the air.

"We’d like to welcome a new advertiser to the show today.

"The new music chain store that’s sweeping the nation — ABC Music: Anything But Country. Anything but that idiotic, no-tooth, flag-waving, car-racing, no-mind crap. We’re ABC and we’re headed to some crappy mall near you.’

"Actually it was one of the residents on his way to the workshop. He had already decided he wasn’t going to work when he walked past the staff office window, so he walks out the door and part way to work, then slowly grinds his forward motion to a halt and starts chugging backwards, thinking the Santa hat makes him invisible and anonymous with all those other Santas out there.

"He got all the way back to the group home, choo-chooing backwards to the side door, then turned and walked in.

"What happened after that is left to our imagination.

"I just happened to be driving past and am relating the story to you-all.

"I worked for the agency for awhile, a few years, don’t want to say for sure, don’t really want to know. No more. My wife, bless her soul, so many times has stared at that health insurance sign-up sheet and had it yanked out of her hands just a few days or weeks later, because for some reason I later decided I could not work for the bastards.

"I have seen folks taken care of by other folks, lovingly, patiently, in wheelchairs, not in wheelchairs, people who cannot get dressed or use the restroom, or eat without someone else running their cheeseburger through a blender, tightening their braces or pulling their underwear down and placing them on the toilet with use of a lift.

"This goes on day after day, first the parents, then later in life, the staff. Minute care is taken for the emotional and physical well-being of the residents, for the feelings of people who can’t see or hear or speak. Meetings are held for hours to decide if someone who cannot bathe himself should be eating whole wheat or white.

"And then in an instant we blow these other folks up. These people somewhere else, in Iraq.

"We spend years and careers making sure Joe’s medications are on the money and we blow apart another Joe’s head in less then a moment. Scatter his brains and eyes and skin all over the living room wall.

"Nothing about whether this will be good for Joe or whether Joe should have some say in determining his own destiny, letting him be a self-advocate.

"Tongue and gums and toenails and snot and layers of greasy fat dripping from the ceiling.

"No meetings, no programs, no agendas or meeting ice-breakers or someone bringing snacks and telling some inane joke about their kids and their husband playing horsy on Christmas morn.

"Just boom. Blood and teeth and hair all over the room. On the agency stationary and everything.

"These right-wing Christians who voted for Bush and who go to church twice on Sunday.

"That’s why I hate America.

"I really do.

I’m an American who was confirmed by the Archbishop, who hates America with a passion, and individuals even worse.

The forests are sacred.

––––––––

After finishing up his daily show, Jack King pulled out a yellow legal pad from one of Cherry’s drawers, and tested out another opening line for his newest blockbuster novel.

Forests are sacred and corn is boring.

Forests are bigger than corn, and if there were something in there you wouldn’t necessarily see it.

Though it’s true that with corn sometimes there are make-believe dead ballplayers, and that’s pretty cool....

I would give anything to know the truth — to really know it — not just suspect it. I would make a deal with the devil, the Russians, the Yankees, to know. I would give up my life, my family, my place in line for heaven, if I could only know.

Please, dear Jesus, for this I pray.

Jack ripped the sheet from the pad and tossed it into the wire basket by the door with a one-handed, seated jumpshot.

Chapter 3 ...

A former U.S. Marine who participated in capturing ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein said the public version of his capture was fabricated.

—UPI, March 9, 2005

I heard Private Jessica Lynch say: ‘They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff. It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about.’ I heard her say, about the stories that she had bravely fought off her captors, and suffered bullet and stab wounds: ‘I’m not about to take credit for something I didn’t do.’ I heard her say, about her dramatic ‘rescue’: I don’t think it happened quite like that."

— Eliot Weinberger, What I Heard About Iraq, FellowshipMagazine

"Good morning my backyard! ... Hello, crows!

Well, it’s true that this program supposedly goes farther than the clothesline, but it’s hard to tell. Is the truth getting out there? Or is it just this little room that is the lone LFZ, Lie Free Zone," in America?... If there are new listeners out there, I want to tell you that this is a brand new Internet radio program that you have stumbled on by the grace of the spirit of Ben Franklin. It’s called ‘Bigfoot Radio’ because we are looking for the truth, the lie, the myth — what is a hoax and what is real. We’re trying to look behind the curtain and see who is pulling the handles, pushing the buttons. Is this Oz, or Kansas?

"Why do you never hit the green lights in sync? Wouldn’t you like to know? Why do those street lights sometimes go off just as you approach? Why, oh, why do folks always stop talking when you enter the room.

"Let’s find out together.

"This is ‘Bigfoot Radio’, coming to you from the bowels of the monster, on www.lookinforbigfoot.net.

Tiananmen Square. Could not believe it was happening. Lots of young folks, lots. Give them a few years and they will be on the sofa watching the protests, if there are any. Just wondering, would it be better not to have kids? Face it, you have two children, you are out of the game. The coach puts you on the sidelines like you had just broken your ankle...."

-

After Jack finished his radio show for the day he pushed back from the computer and leaned to fill his cup with coffee.

The black and white cat hunched at Jack’s feet.

Jack swiveled his chair to confront the intelligent brown eyes, fingered the hole in the crotch of his navy blue sweatpants, looked at the clock on this desk, then back to the cat. The cat’s eyes had not left Jack. It meowed. It never meowed unless it absolutely needed something.

What do you want, Waco?

Meow.

Jack tramped into the living room, into the kitchen to check the water dish, then back again. He took his spot again and spoke to Waco, who had not changed position.

Meow. Meow. Meow.

What more could you possibly want? Jack put his hands toward the ceiling. He darted a look at the screen on Cherry’s orange Macintosh computer. The screen popped to the saver, a helicopter shot of downtown Saint Paul, Minnesota. Jack rested his chin on his fist and found the Ordway, the World Theatre, the hockey arena, the river, and the street where he would have coffee with marble artists and have his hair cut by published novelists.

He looked back and the cat was gone. Jack swiveled and startled at the sight of Waco perched on the desk.

Waco purred and stretched his neck to be petted. Jack rubbed both sides of the cat’s head.

Well. What more could you want, guy? You’ve got good schools, infrastructure, good roads ... sewer ... water. What is all this m’yowing about, huh, fella?

Jack Robert King leaned back and watched gold leaves trickle past the west window. Without seeing, his eyes scanned the Iowa Newspaper Association awards on the wall with Leigh’s drawings taped over the plaques. He considered moving to the chair in front of the music stand holding the C Pocket Pal and Jon Gindick blues lesson sheets.

He had another hour before he had to be at the elementary to pick up Leigh. Johnny would need a ride after football practice. Jack thought he might put out a frozen pizza and ice water for today’s after school snack.

Cherry would be home from school at five, then rush back to the high school for a seven o’clock board meeting. Jack would need to have something on the table for them by five-thirty.

Now that their side of the Field of Dreams movie site tourist spot was closed for the summer, Jack thought he should be able to get some work done on his real writing.

It had been Cherry’s idea to try this — this house on the prairie living experiment. The Kings had moved into the farm home three miles out of Dyersville after Cherry landed the high school principal’s job. This was the first time the house had been rented. The owners had decided that having a typical family living there added authenticity for the tourists.

He could write better after a nap. Jack pushed off and walked in his stocking feet, sliding on the wood floor. He took a long run then cruised all the way into the kitchen.

The Field of Dreams home was better than the old farm house near Mason City they had lived in the past three years.

But the ash floors, ash stairs and railings and ash kitchen cabinets and ashen butcher block fixing station made Jack fidgety.

More than once he had turned around with his hands down his pants itching his nuts to see a young man and his toddler son peeking through the window to see how real Iowa people lived.

Jack often sat at night on the porch swing in the southwest corner of the wrap-around porch. The swing had been installed for the movie. Jack liked to close his eyes and listen to the squeak of the swing, the wind in the corn, the howling of a dog in town, the crack of a bat, opening his eye just a smidge hoping to see a shooting star or a neon message board on the side of a UFO: We’re Coming, Sit Still.

Sometimes when he opened his eyes his family would be seated around him on the porch, staring silently out into the dark, listening, all hoping to hear very far away: the whining of a semi on the highway, the slapping of a screen door in town perhaps, the thoughts of a monk on a mountain. On that porch they thought their dreams, twisted the clouds into the squeaky balloon toys of their wildest hopes. Out there they could catch cowboy whispers driven by the wind from Montana and the Nebraska Sandhills. Each King wondered what was really out there and what they could truly be, and then opened their eyes to glare at the ones next to them, the ones who were keeping them from finding any magic.

Once Jack had sat there and looked around, and it shot him like a dart in the heart to see each of them doing what he did, holding their hands in their laps, ripping, picking, tearing at their fingernails while looking into the distance.

Jack liked listening to the faint sound of the announcer in town at the American Legion game and the croaking of the crickets, with his eyes half-opened, imagining them to be telling him, yes, they knew about him since the beginning of time and he was indeed special.

He imagined the string of yellow front lights winding up the road, the people from town, from all over Iowa, from snooty parts of New Hampshire, coming to hear Jack read from his latest work.

The inside of the house was also movie-production friendly, impractical with its extra wide doorways and unusually spaced distances, as the twenty yards from the toaster to the knife drawer and the refrigerator.

The farmer that Jack and Cherry rented from owned the land from right field to left-center.

A corporation owned left field and the left field-third base foul line.

Each owner ran his own souvenir shop and grudgingly shared the infield area, where for four months dads tossed lollipop underhand pitches to their boys and girls.

This past summer Jack had sat in the front yard and watched a man wearing a Kansas City Royals cap and faded T-shirt pitch to all comers from noon until dark.

The smile did not leave the man’s face until he stepped across the first baseline at the end of the day. Sweating, barely able to walk, he staggered past his tired family to a maroon Ford Explorer with Kansas plates waiting in the gravel parking lot. Jack kept his eyes on the man.

He leaned on the open van door with his old ball glove in his left hand. He took one last scan of the Field of Dreams, then looked right at Jack, then fired the glove into the vehicle, jumped in, started the motor and roared away with his family trying to climb in before he left them.

The man fingered the wheel, guiding the vehicle through the maze of traffic with the deft touch of an astronaut piloting a moon landing vehicle. A real guy.

Jack used to love baseball. He grew up knowing the names of every team that played each year in the Iowa state high school championships in Carroll and Marshalltown. But since his coach left Jack hadn’t had much time for it.

He often watched the couples walk around the outfield holding hands, imagining what it could have been like here for the ten weeks that Kevin Costner roamed these fields, shagging fly balls, hitting grounders to the crew members.

And he thought that when Cherry pulled in and marched up the white picket fence sidewalk lined with little yellow, red, and blue flowers, he might shuffle over to her and grab her hand to squeeze.

Whereas, she would look him in the eye as if being confronted by a young black man wearing a black full-face stocking cap in a Minneapolis parking garage.

Being a stay-at-home dad had been all right for a while. Jack took care of Leigh when she needed him and had time to write his novels and recently to put out his daily radio show on the Internet, but what Cherry really wanted to see was a paycheck.

Tell those people to send you some money. If they are going to listen, they should pay for it.

I don’t think they would.

Then why do you do it?

––––––––

Jack headed to the couch, fell over the backrest, and kicked his stocking feet in the air. Then he found a pillow